Baedaltong (배달통)

» see bdtong.co.kr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Baedaltong launched in April 2010, built by a small Korean outfit called Stonykids, and the thing it stayed proudest of was the date. It called itself the first food-delivery app in the world. That claim is the company's own and the Korean press repeated it rather than tested it, but the timing at least holds up locally: Baemin, the app that went on to own the category, did not reach the iOS store until late June of the same year.

The product itself was unglamorous and it arrived early. Korean food delivery already existed and ran on paper flyers stuck to apartment doors and a telephone. Baedaltong moved that into a phone, sorting the flyers by neighborhood and taking a cut of every order. Delivery Hero bought it in April 2015, by which point the German company also owned Yogiyo, and Baedaltong settled in as the quieter of the two.

It never led. In September 2014 it was already a distant third by unique visitors, behind a Baemin more than four times its size. It held 10.8 percent of the market in 2018 and 1.2 percent by September 2020, having been pushed out of third place that May by Coupang Eats, which was barely two years old.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the parent was doing ~

The interesting pressure on Baedaltong came from above it rather than beside it. In December 2019 Delivery Hero agreed to buy Woowa Brothers, the owner of Baemin, a deal that put essentially the entire Korean delivery market under one German company. The competition regulator approved it in December 2020 on one condition: Delivery Hero had to sell all of Yogiyo.

Five months after that approval, the closure was announced. Delivery Hero never linked the two, and the official statement says only that it decided to end the service after careful thought, citing changes in market conditions and the operating environment. Korean industry commentary filled the gap by assuming the obvious, that a company about to sell one of its three brands had no use for the one nobody was opening. That reading is widely published and nowhere confirmed, and it belongs in this entry as speculation rather than cause.

~ the night it told you to phone ~

A notice appeared on the service's own site between 15 and 20 May 2021 and it is unusually specific about the dismantling. Baedaltong would run only until 22:00 on 24 June. Points stopped accruing at 23:59 on the day the notice appeared and cashback accrual ended on the 31st. Accounts would be closed in bulk after the shutdown rather than left dormant. There was no migration offered to Yogiyo or anywhere else.

On the final evening the notice asked people to move, from 20:00 onward, away from paying inside the app and over to its phone-order button instead, since both were being cut off at 22:00 regardless. An eleven-year-old delivery app spent its last two hours steering customers back toward the telephone it had been built to replace. The staff were not let go, by the company's account, and moved onto its other apps.

The domain baedaltong.com was never the service, which ran at bdtong.co.kr, and today it has been recycled into a GoDaddy page offering the name for sale. The app is gone from the Korean iOS store. By the Economist's reckoning roughly nine in ten of the people using it in 2018 had already gone elsewhere a year later, which means most of what closed in June 2021 had closed quietly, on its own, some time before.

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